Toonerville Trolley (aka Toonerville Folks) was a popular newspaper cartoon feature by Fontaine Fox, syndicated from 1908 to 1955, from the 1930s on by the McNaught Syndicate. The single-panel gag cartoon was a daily look at Toonerville, situated in what are now called the suburbs. Central to the strip was the rickety little trolley called the “Toonerville Trolley that met all the trains,” driven in a frenzy by the grizzly old Skipper to meet each commuter train as it arrived in town. A few of the many richly-formed characters included The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang, The Powerful Katrinka, Little Woo-Woo Wortle, Aunt Eppie Hogg and Mickey McGuire, the town bully. Fontaine Fox described the inspiration for the cartoon series in an article that he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post titled “A Queer Way to Make a Living” (February 11, 1928, page six): “After years of gestation, the idea for the Toonerville Trolley was born one day up in Westchester County when my wife and I had left New York City to visit Charlie Voight, the cartoonist, in the Pelhams. At the station we saw a rattletrap of a street car which had as its crew and skipper a wistful old codger with an Airedale beard. He showed as much concern in the performance of his job as you might expect from Captain Hartley when docking the Leviathan...” Between 1920 and 1922, 17 Toonerville silent film comedy adaptations were scripted by Fox for Philadelphia’s Betzwood Film Company. Another series of films starred Mickey Rooney between 1927 and 1936. Van Beuren Studios animated several cartoons beginning in 1936. Over the years, various Toonerville characters acted as spokemen for popular products of the day, such as, Drano, Kellogg’s cereals, and Chef Boyardee foods. Between 1934 and 1940, comic book reprints of the panel appeared in many issues of All-American Comics, Famous Funnies and Popular Comics. In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative United States postage stamps.

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